Wow! 2025 was another record year on our site for traffic. We published nearly every week day, sometimes publishing on Saturdays and more than once a day! We are so grateful to the environmental history and humanities community for putting trust in us and showing up time and again to contribute and to appreciate and utilize the work coming out on our website. We also want to thank our incredible editorial team for the labour that they put in to publishing this frequently. Let’s see what 2026 has in store.

Here’s some of NiCHE’s 2025 by the numbers:

• 280 Posts
• 326,930 words
• 147,384 visitors
• Seven Book Reviews
• Seven The Otter Series
• Eighteen NiCHE Conversations

Here are our Top Five Most-Read Posts of 2025!

#5: “The Williams Treaties and Indian Day Schools: Law and Schooling as Tools of Dispossession“

Jackson Pind

“The Indian Day School at Curve Lake continued to act as an institution of discipline and surveillance … In doing so, it reinforced the logic of the Williams Treaties: that Indigenous peoples could be made into Canadians, and their claims to Land could be silenced through education and law.”

Part of our series, Land, Memory, and Schooling: Environmental Histories of Colonial Education, guest-edited by Crystal Gail Fraser and Jess Dunkin, Jackson Pind shows how Williams Treaties and Indian Day Schools dispossessed Anishinaabe from Land and identity, and, how the First Nation’s cultural resilience, language, and Land-based resurgencies endure.

#4: “The Athabasca River, Indigenous Knowledge, and Adapting to Danger“

Peter Fortna

“Such interactions have the power to reset relationships and they forced downstream Indigenous peoples to adapt their long-held understandings that the Athabasca River was the giver of life.”

In this article for our Historicizing Adaptation series, edited by Shannon Stunden Bower, Peter Fortna demonstrates that Indigenous communities downstream from the oil sands industry on the Athabasca River distrust tailings management due to decades of contamination, health impacts, and government-industry dismissal of their concerns.

#3: “The Origins and Legacy of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry“

Tina Loo

“The mobility of capital and its placelessness is something that no assessment process or government, regardless of its inclusiveness and commitment to Indigenous rights and regional and national needs, can readily control.”

This article by Tina Loo was part of our series marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, guested-edited by Mark Stoller. Loo argues that while the Berger Inquiry did respond to rising Indigenous and environmental resistance and is widely known to have reshaped pipeline assessments by foregrounding Indigenous rights, participation, and long-term sustainability, the actual story is more complicated and revolves around the federal government’s desire to maintain control over northern development.

2: “‘The Land is No Longer as it Was’: Land Use, Resource Extraction, and Land Claims in the Yukon Territory.“

Glenn Iceton

“Patterns of land use and natural resource development emerged as a central theme in these debates. As land claim negotiations progressed, many settlers launched a negative and sometimes racist campaign against the process.”

The latest article in our peer-reviewed Papers in Canadian History and Environment (PiCHE), Glenn Iceton turns to the political atmosphere in Yukon in 1973, where settlers were opposing Indigenous land claims, fearing economic impacts, and Indigenous groups were responding by fighting for recognition and justice.

1: “Playing the Vanishing Frontier: Red Dead Redemption 2 and the Environmental Imagination”

Nolan Reynolds

“The game trains its players into a particular understanding of how both history and environment work. It privileges surface immersion over structural change, sensation over ecological instability.”

Fans of the video game Red Dead Redemption 2 flocked to Nolan Reynolds’ article in December. Part of our Playing Inside: Board Games, Video Games, and the Indoors series, edited by Jesse Ritner, Reynolds explains that RDR2 players control Arthur Morgan, navigating story missions while also exploring independently–hunting, riding, fishing, crafting, and encountering wildlife. The game encourages players to linger: fog settles on swamps at dawn, thunder rolls across the plains, and animal behaviors respond to time of day and weather cycles. These features produce an environmental world that feels alive.